With his 7-episode series premiering on the Lido later this month, and on October 11th on Apple TV+, Alfonso Cuarón joins the select group of filmmakers who need longer than 3 hours to tell their story.
“DISCLAIMER*
*Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.” That’s the tagline to the upcoming series and personally, I love it! Plus, a character played by Cate Blanchett who is a journalist is simply icing on the cake. After Lydia Tár, this is the role Blanchett was born to play, and she proved she knows how to in Truth, where she starred as real-life producer Mary Mapes, opposite Robert Redford’s Dan Rather of 60 Minutes.
The teaser for the 7-hour long series was released earlier today.
But yesterday, Mexican filmmaker and London resident Alfonso Cuarón released some images from his latest venture, the highly anticipated series Disclaimer, starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sasha Baron Cohen and a slew of up and coming talent. He picked Instagram as a platform and included the captions from each photo. See below…
Written and directed by five-time Academy Award winner Cuarón, Disclaimer is based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Renée Knight. Acclaimed journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (played by Cate Blanchett) has built her reputation revealing the misdeeds and transgressions of others. When she receives a novel from an unknown author, she is horrified to realize she is now the main character in a story that exposes her darkest secrets. As Catherine races to uncover the writer’s true identity, she is forced to confront her past before it destroys both her own life and her relationships with her husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen), and their son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee).
The series is is produced by Esperanto Filmoj (Cuarón’s company) and Anonymous Content. Cuarón serves as executive producer alongside Esperanto Filmoj’s Gabriela Rodriguez and Anonymous Content’s David Levine and Steve Golin. The novel’s writer, Knight, serves as co-executive producer. Academy Award winner Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity, Birdman, The Revenant) and Academy Award nominee Bruno Delbonnel (The Tragedy of Macbeth, Inside Llewyn Davis, Darkest Hour) serve as directors of photography, as well as executive produce. Donald Sabourin and Carlos Morales also executive produce. The score is composed by multiple Academy and Grammy Award winner Finneas O’Connell, who is known for Barbie and No Time to Die.
While I have been critical of filmmakers who “drone on and on” with their long films, I appreciate that Cuarón is giving us the option to watch the series one episode at a time, or perhaps wait until the last one is streamed and catch up with the entire series in one sleepless night. My opinion might be an unpopular one, but I remain of the idea that Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon should have been a series, not a film, and then the filmmaker would have had the time and cinematic space to tell the story properly… There, my two-cents.
Header image courtesy of Apple TV+, used with permission.